"The ten personal essays in Bequeath explore the meaning of bequests received by Melora Wolff over the past fifty years from teachers, schoolmates, authors, recluses, criminals, and generations of family members. Letters, ticket stubs, a car, a Nabokov novel first read in a writing seminar-these passed-down objects evoke legacies of relationships. The essays work cumulatively to form a memoir of female maturation amid dense environments: an eccentric city school; a storied mansion in New York City; a summer rental house ...
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"The ten personal essays in Bequeath explore the meaning of bequests received by Melora Wolff over the past fifty years from teachers, schoolmates, authors, recluses, criminals, and generations of family members. Letters, ticket stubs, a car, a Nabokov novel first read in a writing seminar-these passed-down objects evoke legacies of relationships. The essays work cumulatively to form a memoir of female maturation amid dense environments: an eccentric city school; a storied mansion in New York City; a summer rental house shared with mother, sister, and father; and the idealistic atmosphere of 1970s feminism. As the essays appear in chronological order, the persona ages from seven years old to sixty. The settings are predominantly parks, homes, and streets of New York-a place by turns dangerous, thrilling, illusory, fatal-that shapes the author's persona as much as her father, a musician and WWII non-com veteran who expressed himself through jazz, games, and TV. Memories of city and family shape the persona's perceptions of men, women, loss, and inheritance, troubled by events of power and destruction and often returning to the central figure of her father. Wolff's factual, detailed essays are built like short stories, made of scenes, dialogue, and detailed characters. The narrator confuses the lines between her real life and an imagined one, as the essays merge techniques of fiction and nonfiction. Lovers of stories, essays, and memoirs will find much to entice them in this unusual, moving collection of personal reflections and crystalline speculative reveries. Eschewing many familiar conventions of the essay form and featuring a bold structure with unexpected entanglements of history and fantasy, Bequeath bestows on readers an evocative expression of candor, grief, and love"--
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